Because my position as operations officer provides me access to the latest brigade intelligence, yet I am only a lieutenant and thus approachable by all ranks, I am asked ten times an hour, “Yosi, when will the war start? Is H-hour tomorrow?”
I don’t know.
“Will the government bring back Moshe Dayan?”
I don’t know.
“Will they give Dayan supreme command? Will he be prime minister?”
I don’t know.
Yoel Gorodish doesn’t know.
Shmulik Gorodish doesn’t know.
Not even General Tal knows.
I am thinking not of Dayan, but of Yizhar Armoni and Joseph Trumpeldor. If war comes, will I live up to their example? Will I serve as valiantly as they did, and give to my country all that I have?
26.
MINISTER OF DEFENSE
Colonel Dov Sion is, as I said, General Sharon’s liaison with General Headquarters. He and I have not known each other well for very long, but already a strong unspoken communion is growing between us. Dov makes sure I have everything I need, including a pistol—an American .45—and deflects with a sharp look the approaches of soldiers and correspondents seeking “inside information” on the state of affairs between my father and Prime Minister Levi Eshkol.
Yael Dayan remains with Arik Sharon’s division at Nitzana on the Egyptian frontier.
Supper is late in Arik’s caravan on the evening of June 1. The eleven o’clock news is reporting that offers of a position have been made by Eshkol’s government to my father—“an advisory role,” “a consultative position in the army.”
Dayan has turned them down. He will not accept a ceremonial post. He will drive a half-track, the radio quotes him as declaring, rather than serve in an ornamental capacity.
I fall asleep, missing the twelve o’clock broadcast.
When I wake, the news is on every man’s lips: General Dayan has been appointed minister of defense.
“It took the arrival of 80,000 Egyptian troops in Sinai,” he says for the newspapers, “to get me back into the government.”
I try to stay objective about the reaction of the soldiers to my father’s appointment. I can’t. Overnight the mood of the army has undergone a radical transformation. I am congratulated again and again. At six thirty in the morning I phone my father at home. “I’ve got a new job,” he says, “with a car and a secretary.”
In Sharon’s trailer, officers are hoisting cups of cognac before breakfast. What has changed since last night? Neither the war plans nor the commanders. The army was ready before Dayan; it is ready now. Sharon puts the feeling into words. “Now we will have war.”
A profound relief and satisfaction animates all.
Moshe Dayan fields reporters’ questions.
“See if you can get home tonight,” Arik tells me. He gives me a few things for his wife, Lily. Their house is only a few blocks from ours in Zahala. This is what war is like in a country as small as Israel. You leave the front at six and you’re home before eight.
My mother exclaims at my state of desert dishevelment. “Your hair!” My father is home for an hour between meetings. We embrace. He wants to know, How do the troops feel? How is Arik? What is the state of morale?
“Go take a bath,” he says. “You’ll feel human again.”
My brother Assi is home, in uniform, on a three-hour pass from his unit. My mother readies the Friday meal. The house is full of flowers and chocolates, baskets of cheese and fruit. “Take some,” says my father.
“Must you go right back?” my mother asks.
For my father the last-minute politics of appointment have apparently been excruciating, with double-crosses and near double-crosses abounding. Dayan takes part in no such dealings, even in his mind. “They know what I want and where I can be found. They have my telephone number.”
Dov is shy with my mother and soldier-friendly with Assi. I head for the tub, leaving him and my father to feel each other out. Afterward I grab packages of nuts and chocolate. I stuff my pack with clean socks and underwear, skin cream, a windbreaker. My father gives Dov a bottle of whiskey. He says little, preoccupied by a thousand urgencies and eager to get back to the meetings that will continue long into the night. He is happy. Reaction to his appointment has been everything he had hoped for.
For the first time my father possesses full military powers, unlike in ’56, when Ben-Gurion was both prime minister and minister of defense and my father was chief of staff. This time he has no one over him. Responsibility rests on his shoulders alone.
Moshe Dayan is the man for the job, and now he has it. The army waits like a coiled spring. It wants nothing but the hand to set it loose.
27.
THE ELEVENTH COMMANDMENT
It is the night of June 1. The first meeting of the expanded cabinet is about to convene. I am thinking of David Ben-Gurion.
Moshe Dayan is now minister of defense.
“God left one commandment out of the Bible,” Ben-Gurion used to say. “Perhaps the Almighty delivered this commandment to Moses but Moses forgot to bring it down from the mountain.
“That commandment is Number Eleven:
“‘Be strong.’”
How many nights have I met alone with Ben-Gurion when he was prime minister and minister of defense and I was his army chief of staff? Ben-Gurion would be at the point of authorizing a military operation—a cross-border raid, say, in retaliation for the murder by Arab infiltrators of another young farmer or another Jewish family. The two of us would confer alone over the maps and the operational plans. With sober gravity Ben-Gurion would ask, “How many casualties will our forces sustain, Moshe? Can this operation succeed? Can you guarantee me that our young men will be back safely by dawn?”
No military man can offer such assurances. But I did, for his sake, to make his decision easier. He understood. Beneath all debate and discussion lay the necessity to act—and the knowledge that such actions would be accompanied by grave consequences. Ben-Gurion hated it. Each drop of blood felt extracted from his own veins.
Many times I would become impatient with him because of what I deemed his excessive preoccupation with the political repercussions of our actions. “How will the UN react? The Americans? The Russians?”
I am minister of defense now. I must think as Ben-Gurion did then. The burden will be terrible. I feel it already.
David Ben-Gurion, first prime minister of Israel.
The first meeting of the expanded cabinet convenes, as I said, on the evening of my appointment, Thursday, June 1. Since the nation now has a unity government, those political parties that have previously been excluded except in the crisis as members of the opposition—Gahal and Rafi, my party—are represented. Menachem Begin of Gahal has a seat for the first time as a minister of the government. Gahal is an acronym for Gush Herut-Liberalim. It represents the 1965 merger of the two furthest right parties in Israel: the Herut (Freedom) Party and the Liberal Party.
In the days of the dissident paramilitary group, the Irgun Zvai Leumi, when the most radical Jewish patriots used terror to hasten the British exit from Mandate Palestine, Begin was among the most extreme. Under his command, the IZL bombed the King David Hotel on July 22, 1946, killing ninety-one people. Begin is curt, humorless, intractable. But he is without fear. He has endured political imprisonment under the Soviets, from which ordeal he emerged tougher than ever and more passionately dedicated to Jewish nationhood and to political autonomy for the Jewish people. He is a good man, possibly a great one. The nation needs men like him as much as she needs visionaries like Ben-Gurion and poets like Natan Alterman.
“To the banks of the Jordan” is Begin’s party’s signature. His vision is of the Israel of the Bible. He speaks passionately at this cabinet meeting, citing numerous biblical passages, to which Eshkol with good humor appends, “Amen, ame
n.”
Begin, more than anyone, has been the engine of my appointment as minister of defense. Not out of affection or personal regard for me (I fought him, Jew against Jew, over arms smuggling in 1948), but to bring war. Days before, Begin had pulled levers for Ben-Gurion, whose bitter foe he had been for years, seeking Ben-Gurion’s appointment as prime minister or minister of defense for the same reason: to produce war.
My name came next.
On Friday morning, June 2, comes the first critical meeting. It takes place at 11:30, immediately following a joint session of the General Staff and the Ministerial Defense Committee. The attendees are limited to myself and Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, Foreign Minister Abba Eban, Army Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin, and Yigal Allon, the former Palmach commander and current labor minister, who had been my chief rival for the post of minister of defense. Eshkol presides. He turns to me first and asks what I think the government should do.
“Attack at once. Today is Friday. If the cabinet so authorizes when it convenes on Sunday, orders can be given immediately to the commanders in the field. The war will start Monday morning.”
The objective of our forces, I declare, should be the destruction of Nasser’s divisions in Sinai. We should have no aims of territorial expansion, nor should we take any military action whose intent is to conquer the Gaza Strip or to take possession of the Suez Canal. The campaign will last, I estimate, between three and five days.
Against us now in Sinai are 130,000 troops, 900 tanks, and 1,100 guns. Egypt has fielded the equivalent of seven divisions. We have three.
Nasser’s chief of staff, Lieutenant General Abdel Moneim Riad, has set up command headquarters in Amman. Jordan’s armed forces—eleven brigades totaling 56,000 men, with 176 modern Patton and Centurion tanks—are now under his command. An Iraqi mechanized brigade, the 8th, is preparing to enter Jordan as we speak; it can be on our frontier within hours. Already two elite Egyptian commando battalions, the 33rd and the 53rd, are in place on Jordanian soil. Their role can be nothing other than to strike into the heart of Israel, possibly preemptively, to attack air bases and power and communications centers and to spread chaos and disorder. In addition, Hussein and Riad have moved forward to Jerusalem the Imam Ali Brigade to reinforce the King Talal already in place. Both are elite, British-trained formations of the Arab Legion.
If General Riad strikes from Jordan, Israel will be facing war on two fronts. Should Syria join in with her sixteen brigades, 70,000 men, 550 tanks, and 120 aircraft, we’ll be fighting on three. Our forces are not sufficient for this. Israel has barely enough men to take on Egypt alone.
These figures of enemy combatants do not include Nasser’s support from the wider Arab world. Our intelligence reports a Kuwaiti armored brigade en route to Sinai. Expeditionary forces of unknown size have been promised to Egypt by Libya, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Sudan. Iraqi premier Tahir Yahya has signed a mutual defense pact with Cairo. The Soviets are sending shipments of arms to Egypt and Syria, while our own allies, Britain and the United States, stall on deliveries of weapons we have already paid for. De Gaulle has cut us off entirely. Behind Nasser now stand Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan, Algeria, and Yemen. King Hassan II of Morocco has dispatched a special envoy with pledges of assistance; President Habib Bourguiba has promised that an Algerian army will be permitted passage through Tunisia to fight the Zionists. Even Nasser’s worst enemy, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, has declared:
Every Arab who does not participate in this conflict will seal his fate. He will not be worthy of being called an Arab.
while Iraqi president Abdul Rahman Arif has been quoted by the BBC:
Our goal is clear—to wipe Israel off the face of the map. We shall, God willing, meet in Tel Aviv and Haifa.
And still the government dithers and dilates. The June 2 meeting adjourns without a decision. I pass June 3 in meetings from dawn till midnight. The prime minister and foreign minister continue to hang fire, waiting for the green light from the Americans.
How will this go-ahead be communicated to us? By a wink perhaps, or a nod. Our ministers scrutinize remarks by Secretary of State Dean Rusk, National Security Adviser Walt Rostow, and his brother Eugene Rostow, undersecretary of state for political affairs, as well as comments and notes from UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg and Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas. The parsing reaches such a state that our fellows are combing word by word through a Joseph Alsop column in Newsweek.
On June 4, Sunday, the cabinet convenes in the interval between two meetings of the Ministerial Defense Committee. Prime Minister Eshkol at last puts two resolutions to the vote.
The first, by me, calls for war. It requests that the government grant to the prime minister and the minister of defense the authority to choose the date and the hour for commencement of hostilities.
The second resolution, put forward by the representative of the Labor Party, calls for further delay.
In the moments before the vote, Menachem Begin crosses to me. He has sounded the cabinet members, he says. He is confident. The stalemate will be broken.
“I will next shake your hand,” he says, “beside the Western Wall.”
Begin is one kind of Jew. Eshkol is another. I am like neither.
My experience is founded neither in Russia nor in Europe. I am a sabra. I was born here in Israel. I know nothing of the Talmud and I don’t want to know. I have no use for Yiddish. The so-called Jewish experience, which shaped my mother and father and other Diaspora Jews—the debates of the rabbis and the scholars, the interpretations of the law—to me these are angels dancing on the head of a pin. Nor do I make a religion of Zionism or socialism or the labor movement, despite all their worthy achievements.
My Bible consists of the books of the Patriarchs and the Judges. Its pages narrate the stories of Joshua and Gideon, of Saul and David and Jonathan. Say these names: Galilee, Mount Carmel, Beersheba, the Vale of Sharon. These sites are not theoretical to me. They are not a dream longed for from afar. They comprise the hills and flats that I have plowed and planted, tramped over and slumbered upon. A field at Ramat Yohanan has soaked up the last of my brother Zorik’s blood. I left my own eye in the dirt across the border with Lebanon. How many thousands have given the same and more?
The treads of a half-track rend a slope that has no name and is known to no one: Up comes an arrowhead three thousand years old. Dig again. Into the sunlight emerges a shard from the era of Joshua, the handle of a vessel from which a soldier of Israel once drank. Who was that man? He was myself.
I am that man.
He shivered on watch, this fellow thirty centuries gone; he marched through the night; he defended his fields and his flocks. As a boy of fourteen I guarded our granaries at Nahalal with a weapon I had fashioned myself of an iron head and an oak shaft—a spear. When my nephew Uzi graduated first in his class in the officers’ course, I presented to him, as a gift of honor, three warheads from the days of Joshua. These are not relics to me or to him. They are the weapons with which real Jews fought and died, doing what he and others will do now. No Israeli family lacks losses like ours. I am named for the first settler at Kibbutz Deganiah Alef to be killed by our enemies. Did my mother and father feel the need to tell me why they chose this name? I knew without speech, as did we all.
All the same, I am no hater of Arabs. I grew up with Bedouin herders and farmers. We have plowed together, and planted, and sat side by side in the furrows to take our noon meal.
Who is the Arab? No man makes a better friend than he. None will stand his ground with greater courage. To the Arab, honor is all. He will drain his blood for the clan and the tribe, and for the stranger he has taken in at the gate. No one laughs like an Arab, or loves his children with such tenderness; no one dances like him or worships God with greater devotion, and none is more compassionate to the weak and the helpless.
The modern world, in which the so
ns of Ishmael have fallen behind and become a backward people, is a nightmare of shame from which the proud Arab cannot awaken. This is the source of his violent and inextinguishable rage.
I fear Nasser not for his Soviet arms or for his brilliance as a provocateur and a brinksman, but because he has planted the standard of his ambition within this soil of wrath and shame. My people will bleed for this, but his will bleed more.
In Sinai in ’56, when our armor broke through the Egyptian formations, their officers fled. Nasser’s captains and colonels commandeered the fastest vehicles and bolted for the safety of the Canal. Their men, bereft of leadership, were incapable of acting on their own. They shed their shoes and took to flight.
No one is more keenly aware of this humiliation than the Arab himself, and of all Arabs, Nasser. Patriotism cannot overturn this, nor can poetry. Only the sword will serve. Who speaks for the fellah or the fedayee? The Arab intellectual is the loneliest man on earth, for he is trapped in the void between reason and faith.
The cabinet votes.
My resolution is adopted, fourteen to two.
I phone the chief of staff and inform him that the government has approved the army’s operational plan.
The war will start at 07:45 tomorrow morning.
BOOK FOUR
MOKED
28.
THE BAT SQUADRON
Major Ran Ronen commands Fighter Squadron 119:
I am the last squadron commander to enter base commander Shmuel Shefer’s office. It’s evening. Outside, the duty shifts are changing, technical crews heading home after the day’s work.
Colonel Shefer stands and takes a piece of chalk from a drawer in his desk. Without a word, he turns to the forward blackboard and writes in bold, stark strokes: